It's true. There's an accumulation of small details involving spacing that LaTeX gets right but something like Word gets wrong, each of them individually almost imperceptible, but adding up to an effect where the LaTeX document looks somehow clean and correct, and the Word document looks like a big mess. I can detect a Word document almost immediately on sight but it takes me a while to follow up and find the concrete evidence of Wordness.
Somehow it’s “characteristically ugly” for me, looking at these examples specifically. You can get good-looking documents in LaTeX if you customize formatting just a little bit, but the default colors, shapes and even fonts are just off. Especially Beamer.
It’s really like a style of clothing: a sort of old man’s suit that looks normal in academic institutions but in most other settings you do look like you’ve just come from that institution.
The typesetting is much better than anything in common (non-design-professional) use though.
On the flip side of the coin, I would say don't attempt to customize it. LaTeX out of the box is essentially what you need for an easy to read document.
There is no LaTeX graphic designer out there. I would agree to a little defeat and say the poster example on that website looked bad. If customizability is something people are looking for LaTeX is not the ideal choice because the learning curve for advance use can be incredibly steep, you may not have a good eye for good graphics if you are using LaTex in the first place and you might compromise early and say good enough.
100% agree. Some people have a fetish for wide aspect ratio fonts, such as some of the Computer Modern family. Must have been the fashion at some point.
you sure it’s crisp? Not another word starting with cr and ending with p?
Seriously, TeX is a bad maths language [http://xahlee.info/cmaci/notation/TeX_pestilence.html], surrounded by a terrible document markup language, wrapped in tooling straight from the 1980s, plus a community only too willing to tell you how your question is wrong.
> a community only too willing to tell you how your question is wrong
Been there, experienced that. Like this one poor guy who dared to ask at the TeX.StackOverflow help desk—"what can I do to get this and that vertical line in my table", only to get lectured by one acolyte, "Oh noes, don't, vertical lines bad, only horizontal lines in tables, proven to be the only way to go". Which totally throws centuries of finely typeset mathematical, astronomical and nautical tables out of the window while not answering the question.
To be fair, there are quite a few people on the TeXSO that go to incredible lengths to give extensive answers—expositions really—to hairy questions ('hairy' being a technical term here which translates to 'daily' in the context of TeX).
haha, I don't have much experience with mathematical equation writing in LaTeX, I just like how the words and document look. So I can't say much about this.
In the 90s, I used to imagine the future to be one where "browsers" would be much less than combined JavaScript execution / DOM+CSS layout engines and hence able to do much more by downloading (signed) decoders/renderers on-demand for different content types, of which DVI would be just one of many.
There are still huge conceptual leaps to be made in the notion of a computer as a document creator and content rendering, and Smalltalk provides some clues in that direction, though I doubt we'll see it in my lifetime, considering the weight of the last twenty-five years will make it difficult to change course.
The relevance of the above flight of fantasy to your point is that LaTeX, for all its awkwardness, is absolutely a local maxima in document creation, and I love seeing its results appear from the markup, knowing that it's following the numbers precisely, as if by magic, and print them out and marvel at the quality of the fonts close-up, and we need more such systems with which to create and render content, before denting the DOM+CSS hegemony in the manner I described above.
The whole issue with LaTeX ia that it renders to PDFs, which aren't appropriate these days any more for most electronic documents because you want reflowable content rather than fixed layout. And (m)HTML is great for that and can include other content types :
Please show me a reflowable document with decent typographics. No, seriously, why browsers don’t implement fully-featured layout algorithms? Until then, I’d prefer a well-typeset PDF over an average website for a longer-form and graphics-rich content.
Also, those are naturally usable offline, are durable and have no interactive annoyances.
Hmm, do you have any more specific examples of typographics being a deal breaker ?
MHTML (aka .eml) is usable offline too (except for some reason by Firefox ?!?), while PDFs are horrible on screens smaller than the width of a page.
I'm not sure what interactive annoyances on scientific websites you're talking about - the most problematic ones these days are those with the assumption of a working Java or Flash plugin (and if they start to be plagued by irrelevant scripts it's much easier so far to block JavaScript in a browser than in a pdf reader), meanwhile many pdf readers don't even have any animation support, which is about content rather than presentation ! (As a metaphor : would you support a format unable to show pictures ?)
I'm afraid you rather missed the point in the last paragraph -- "we need more such systems with which to create and render content, before denting the DOM+CSS hegemony". Fixed format is much preferable for textbooks or other publications which have many diagrams as part of the body text.
Textbooks, sure - other publications with many diagrams - that's my whole point, no (the fixed format often makes understanding worse because they can't just put the diagram in the specific spot that refers to it, and finding that spot is additional work) - also pdfs only really support fixed, non-interactive diagrams.
As far as I know the main issue there is that LaTeX is a Turing-complete language and no reliable complete export filter can exist, so in particular one cannot export reliably all of LaTeX to HTML
I don't think Turing-completeness implies any issues when converting programs between equally powerful automata. In fact, a lot of results in the theory of automata / early computational complexity take a form of converting all programs of machine A -- in fact the machine itself -- in order to run it on machine B.
In theory there should be no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there often is. TeX's syntax itself being Turing-complete means you can barely start to do static analysis on the code before hitting a wall you can only get over by installing a huge fraction of the ~1GB download that is TeXLive. "Being theoretically possible" is in no way orthogonal to "impractical in many or most circumstances".
> hence able to do much more by downloading (signed) decoders/renderers on-demand for different content types, of which DVI would be just one of many.
I added DVI rendering to NCSA Mosaic in 1994. Didn't go down well with anyone. Probably a good thing overall, but I still think it was a nice idea (multiple different renderers).
